Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [267]
His plan was formed and he felt that it was a good one. He would tune his fiddle to the maximum tenderness it was capable of. He would wait for nightfall. After the evening meal, when things had settled down, he would make his way to Dinka’s hut, which fortunately was one of those on the edge of the settlement. Once there, he would sit outside her door and give her a tune or two. He would serenade her. He had chosen the tunes already: ‘Oh Hear Me’ and ‘Rose of Ireland’. She would be moved by the beauty of it, she would take him in, he would be home and dry. Perhaps she would offer him, in the way of preliminary courtesy, a drop of grain beer. Dinka made an excellent grain beer …
Of course, there would be something public in it, people round would be certain to hear him, they would come crowding out to see this prodigy of song. But Sullivan had never been averse to an audience. And Dinka would not mind her neighbours knowing she was desired by one of the main music-makers of the place. She would be pleased. It was, he sought for the word in his mind, homage. Sullivan knew women. Women liked homage the world over.
He made a narrow loop at one end of the gut and passed a short toggle through it. The other end he tied to a corner post of his hut. He began to twist the gut, pausing often to run the twists higher with his fingers, increasing the tension. She was a beauty, taut and supple as any man could wish.
As soon as he left the shore and began to strike inland, Calley stopped from time to time to gather pieces of pitchwood. These he laid on top of the dead child and then roped the body and the logs together so that the stack rose high above his shoulders. He was almost doubled under this weight when he reached the first huts of the settlement.
The logs were deposited for safe-keeping outside Tabakali’s hut. He knew she would not cheat him and he knew she was charitable with food. On her advice he carried the body to Paris’s sickroom; he was mightily relieved to be told there, by Paris himself, that he had done the right thing.
The body lay there for the rest of the afternoon under a blanket to keep off the flies. It was quite unmarked and Paris could discover no certain cause of death. The boy had not died by drowning, there was no water in the lungs; he had been dead when thrown over the side. It seemed likely that a flux or fever had carried him off. Or the shock of captivity, Paris thought, remembering some of the deaths on board the Liverpool Merchant. Fixed melancholy, that had been Thurso’s phrase for it. But no children had died from this cause, none that he could remember, only adults. Children did not die of unhappiness, they were still too close to the dawn of life … The brandmark on the boy’s chest was an S and an L joined in the shape of a loop with one side curving and one straight. It could be the mark of any of a thousand merchants from a dozen nations. The only one that could be definitely excluded was his uncle. K for Kemp. A long way from Liverpool to this wrecked life. There came into his mind an old adage of the Guinea traders which Barton had let fall to him once – Barton could seldom resist a quote: Heaven is high and Europe far away…
For some time he stood there, in the long, open-fronted hut where he kept his jars of herbs and his instruments and his few belongings, looking at the face of the dead boy. The faces of the dead resemble no living face, but Paris judged this boy to be about the age of his own son. Quite unexpectedly he felt the pricking of tears. Only by fortunate accident had Kenka been born to freedom and kind treatment …
Several people had seen Calley with his burden and the news of the dead boy passed around. Almost everyone in the compound or the immediate surroundings came at some time during the afternoon to see the body. They stood for a while and discussed with one another where the boy might have come from and what people he belonged to. Most saw some resemblance to their own people. Kireku’s woman, Amansa, came with a funeral mat of palmetto leaf. The children stood